Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily is continuing to milk its unusually close relationship with Joe Arpaio's birther posse with a March 19 article by de facto posse member Jerome Corsi detailing how "A retired U.S. Postal Service carrier who delivered mail to Tom and Mary Ayers in a Chicago suburb in the late 1980s and early 1990s [who] claims to have met Obama in front of the Ayers home."
From this, Corsi goes on to extrapolate that "the parents of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers help[ed] finance Barack Obama’s Harvard education," that "Ayers’ mother believe[d] Obama was a foreign student," and that "the young Obama [was] convinced at the time – long before he even entered politics – that he was going to become president of the United States."
Corsi downplays the fact that the postal carrier has no actual evidence whatsoever to back up his claim -- he can't even prove that the man in question was actually Obama. As Dr. Conspiracy sums up: "Whether the elderly mail character is trying to save his country with a lie, or more likely just telling a true story embellished to be interesting, the details don’t hang together and there is no corroboration."
Nevertheless, Corsi's boss, Joseph Farah, thinks this is something like the biggest story ever despite the fact that there's no there there, and he can't imagine why nobody else is covering it:
Why didn’t they touch it?
We have more insight than ever before.
It’s not that the facts aren’t compelling. It’s not that the story is not of interest. It’s not that the story is not being talked about at water coolers across America.
So what is it?
Very simple. This isn’t just your average Bill Ayers story. This one touches on a raw nerve for the media. It touches on the increasing possibility that Obama is not really constitutionally eligible for the presidency after all – a story pooh-poohed by virtually everyone in the media establishment for the last four years.
Actually, this story has nothing to do with eligibility. There is no "insight" here -- just the ramblings of an elderly man trying to remember what he saw 20 years ago, things for which he has absolutely no proof and which wouldn't even pass for hearsay evidence in a court of law.
If the media is ignoring this, as Farah claims it "ignored the first report by the first law-enforcement investigation into the eligibility issue," it's doing sojustifiably. It looks more and more that the Arpaio posse did nothing more than crib from WND's birther conspiracies and conducted no independent research of its own, so the posse has no credibility.
Still, WND plans to flog this story. A follow-up article complained that "Media Matters and other pro-Obama outlets such as the Democratic Underground are reacting in full mock-and-ridicule mode" to the story, positively giddy over the Drudge Report link and how "At one point today, the Web information company Alexa ranked the story as the fifth hottest page on the Internet." But WND will never admit that it's nothing but unproven hearsay.
Farah harrumphed in his column: "We’re watching the Big Media implode like the old Soviet Union – becoming less relevant by the day." As long as WND stays silent about its backroom dealings with Arpaio and the posse, the only person heading for an implosion is Farah.
